Between Catastrophe and Revolution: Essays in Honor of Mike Davis

By OR Books

It is all worse than we think. It is even worse than Mike Davis, for whom “every day is judgment day” (The Nation), could have imagined. The contributions to this volume are explorations of what Davis—in typical wry fashion—once referred to as the field of “disaster studies.” Collectively, they show how our “disaster imaginary” has been rendered inadequate by the existing order’s ability to feed off and coopt our resistance to it.

Contemporary mass protests are now subsumed as instances of an established, profitable politics of rage. Geopolitical conflict poses not as a threat to hegemonic power but rather serves the interests of a global market which capitalizes on lucrative, permanent war. Climate change itself, if it was ever thought to be a universalizing phenomenon, is now treated as an extensive market opportunity by global risk insurance conglomerates and predatory lenders who bet against any rescue of the planet.

Such catastrophic developments resist the language we use to describe and deconstruct them. The contributions to this volume seek to reimagine our understanding of disaster, and, following the example of Davis himself, to refuse outdated models of political transcendence as vigorously as they reject narratives of resignation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OR Books
• Release date: Nov 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781682192795

Book preview

PREFACE

How About Just Plain ‘Catastrophe and Revolution’?

¹

Daniel Bertrand Monk

This collection of essays is the first to aggregate and, in some sense, document the afterlife of the kind of global ecological history that Mike Davis has developed in the course of his own efforts to analyze the relation between an urbanizing humanity and the Anthropocene. Most of its authors came to intellectual maturity in a time when Davis’s arguments were already out there, and served as inspiration for the further labor of others. Each of the works assembled here already assumes prima facie what Davis fought to reintroduce into debates about the historical trajectory of humanity under a neoliberal order: that one must recognize the affirmative character of given definitions of what is realistic in order to lay claim to what is necessary.²

The collection begins with the reconsiderations of time and of history that are prefigured in Mike Davis’s methodology of excavating futures past. In the contributions of William Connolly and Jairus Grove and of Mauro Caraccioli, we are presented with a rich conversation on how a commonplace sociogenic periodization of history has precluded our ability to incorporate the fact of catastrophe into our temporal frameworks of understanding; and then, to link the Anthropocene with a penitent ecology. The editors’ introduction, moreover, situates Mike Davis’s historical vision within a dialectic of catastrophism that cannot be accommodated into normative historiographic trajectories: this is a vision that refuses vulgar models of political transcendence as vigorously as it rejects narratives of resignation, however much it is confused for championing one or the other of these poles.

All contributions assembled here catalog/document the political career of the epistemic failures just introduced. Each essay is a contribution to what Davis—in wry fashion—once referred to as the field of disaster studies, and each author has also developed the historiography of disaster far beyond what Mike Davis himself could have imagined. Where Davis’s Prisoners of the American Dream documented the American working class’s identification with the counterrevolution being waged against it, Don Mitchell, Andrew Herscher, and Ana Muñiz respectively reveal the next steps of the ensuing slow holocaust that has followed. Mitchell anticipates the attention that white people would finally give to the normalized killing of African-American men following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 by documenting how a longstanding police practice of engaging in the extrajudicial eradication of the indigent and racialized poor has been a political project hiding in plain sight for a long time. Herscher, in turn, shows how established Marxist narratives concerning the status of the urban underclass under disaster capitalism are actually inadequate to analyzing the conditions now facing the residents of Detroit, where the paradigm of settler colonialism better explains a condition in which the same racialized poor are replaced rather than exploited. In a reversal of the story outlined in Davis’s Magical Urbanism, Ana Muñiz shows how the children of the same Latinx generation responsible for reviving deindustrializing American cities with their casual labor now cement their own class position by policing migrants and the informal proletariat along the southern border, in the shadow of Donald Trump’s beautiful wall.

It is all worse than we think. As a number of essays in this volume show, our disaster imaginary is rendered inadequate by the extent to which the neoliberal order actually feeds on given concepts of resistance to it, or of its sublation. In Brazil, as Bruno Carvalho shows, the very visions of urban modernity that once served to characterize it as the progressive country of the future—a utopia of racial coexistence in particular—now feed the fantasies of the Bolsonarist hyper-right. With such shifts in consciousness, contemporary mass protests can no longer be understood as moments of revolutionary potential or fleeting hegemony, but are instances of an established politics of rage, argues Mustafa Dikeç. In such a context, even geopolitical conflict can be a function of market logic. In the Middle East, Jacob Mundy suggests, America’s efforts to ensure its hegemony have engendered "a new system of oil for insecurity premised on permanent war in the region."

In the time since Davis deciphered LA’s morphology by reviewing the contradictory impact of economic globalization on urban and regional infrastructures, those contradictions have been normalized into oblivion or routinely acknowledged as a form of their disavowal. This is because those impacts are either mentioned on the way to forgetting them or amortized under necessary evil arguments that identify the private sector with the public good. In a sense, this was always the case, argues Christian Parenti, as he reframes the entire ecological history of the American South as a soil-mining project that effectively depended on an infrastructure of underdevelopment, the social costs of which were externalized onto the enslaved and then the racialized poor. This logic of underdevelopment was, and remains, generalizable as a feature of empire, suggests Waleed Hazbun: twentieth-century infrastructures of aeromobility introduced by the US in the Middle East advanced a global extractive network in which logistical connections began to supersede the sites connected; in this way, political regression was naturalized as technocratic advancement. This figure/ground reversal between cities and supply chain capitalism is now complete, argues Charmaine Chua, as she lays out how the transformations of the port of Los Angeles (and regional transport arteries) now mark the city as an adjunct to a global logistics sector that manages the circulation of goods, materials, and information at a global scale.

The Los Angeles we have learned to associate with Davis’s City of Quartz is already implicated in the making of a contemporary Planet of Slums, as capitalist mega-urbanization is accelerating toward—and is a primary cause of—the unfolding climate catastrophe. And yet, these transformations are also repeatedly assimilated as features of the status quo. Identifying climate change with hyper-objects that are sublime in both their scale and abstraction, China Miéville movingly reveals global warming’s exteriority to any language we might deploy to describe it. Indeed, Miéville shows us how the gap between knowledge and understanding is left wide open, precisely in the way that we now talk about the heat itself. This does not mean that the same hyper-object may not be monetized, however. As Andrew Ross shows us, climate change is itself now treated as an extensive market opportunity by global risk insurance conglomerates and predatory lenders hedging against any rescue of the planet. In other words, capitalism continues to feed on the same alienation of Nature that it will rationally advance until we reach system collapse. In what amounts to a rebuttal to the instrumental reasoning of the catastrophic risk arbitrageurs themselves, Rob Wallace, Kenichi Okamoto, and Alex Liebman seek to model this alienation-cum-catastrophe in quantitative terms, referring to it as a gated ecology by means of which the agents of disaster capitalism segregate themselves conceptually from the planet against which they are betting.

This collection emerged out of a conversation between two friends about the profound importance of a third; a volume of essays in honor of Mike Davis seemed both necessary and overdue, Michael Sorkin and Daniel Bertrand Monk agreed. So did the contributors, who enthusiastically encouraged the editors to proceed with the project, regardless of the obstacles. In the course of its making, some of the collection’s authors fell ill with COVID-19. Michael Sorkin died of the disease in March 2020, a day after shooting his coeditor an email exhorting him to finish the book. Sorkin’s essay is, aptly, the last in this collection. In it he documents how, inscribed in the form of the National Mall in Washington, is the history of the United States’ failure to realize the universals its founding documents invoke; at the same time, Sorkin shows us, those failures unconsciously serve to sustain the same regulative ideals. A vision of and a demand for an emancipated existence is sedimented in the built record of our inability to realize it.

The editors and authors of this work gratefully acknowledge the generosity shown by the Graham Foundation for the Arts and the Colgate University Research Council in bringing this project to fruition. Equally, they would like to recognize the important contributions of Cecilia Fagel and Deen Sharp of Terreform in the making of this volume. Marieke Krijnen was this project’s soul, pure and simple. We are also deeply indebted to Colin Robinson for his gallantry and kindness at a crucial moment in the collection’s history. Finally, this book exists because of the selflessness of Susanna Hecht and Anthony Fontenot. It would not have seen the light of day without the sacrifices they made on its behalf.

Endnotes

1Michael Sorkin to Daniel Bertrand Monk, March 21, 2020. This was the last communication from Michael.

2Mike Davis on the Global Crisis: ‘This Moment Is Not a Tunnel with a Bright Light at the End,’ Salon , July 9, 2020, https://www.salon.com/2020/07/09/mike-davis-on-the-global-crisis-this-moment-is-not-a-tunnel-with-a-bright-light-at-the-end/ .

INTRODUCTION

A Dialectic of Catastrophe and Revolution

Daniel Bertrand Monk

It’s difficult you see

To give up baby

These summer scumholes

This goddamned starving life.¹

—David Bowie

The jacket blurbs of any of Mike Davis’s ten monographs present the reader with the image of an activist, former meatcutter, and truck driver who only happens to have won a MacArthur genius award and written some stuff about impending ecological and social doom. And yet, the man that The Nation has described as the master of disaster prose is clearly more than that.² The disruptions he has caused in the process of examining our shared imagination of disaster actually point to a rigorous and coherent intellectual project that is too easily misrepresented or overlooked. Even sympathetic evaluators seem unable to resist making statements like judgement day is every day with Mike Davis.³ His work is overlooked even as it is ubiquitously cited in the sense that Davis’s systematic destruction of our collective destruction imaginary is part of an intellectual trajectory that can only be defined by what it negates.

Both the trajectory and its logic may be briefly sketched as a prosopography and intellectual history at once. Like those of Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and many of his contemporaries, Mike Davis’s politics were honed by his experiences in the oppositional mass actions of the sixties where, a decade before it hardened into a City of Quartz, Los Angeles served as the capital of an age of revolt.⁴ Unlike many of his counterparts, however, Davis did not reject what he saw as a bourgeois, imperialist, racist, homophobic, and sexist postwar US culture only to then embrace and submit to the Soviets’ actually existing socialism, or any other variants of political or religious authority. Rather, in the experience of collective action itself, Davis encountered a spirit of utopia that he would later recognize in the revolutionary disruptions of the Paris Commune, the anarcho-syndicalist enclaves of fin-de-siècle Catalonia, Red Vienna, and California’s Llano del Rio. To cite Ernst Bloch (one of Davis’s philosophical influences): all of these summon what is not, in the same sense that the younger Beethoven scandalously and without much cause declared himself to be a genius as part of the process of becoming one.⁵ These are traces, in Bloch’s terms, of a potential future that interrupts the present and renders time into something indistinguishable from catastrophe—that is, indistinguishable from an interruption of the eternal sameness sedimented in our notions of progress.

This is not a naïve political theology of hope, however. A fateful encounter with the British New Left during a period of extended residence in England and Ireland (when Davis joined Verso and the New Left Review) coincided with—or influenced—a turn to political economy. And, with that, a consideration of the structural impediments to invoking a new proletarian mass politics and its consciousness. At the same time, Davis would reject the teleological gradualism of the New Left, and more particularly the model of historical transformation it fashioned out of suspect exceptionalist doxa concerning the emergence of a British working class in the absence of violent/open class struggle. More than this, by denying a place to the catastrophic interruptions of Nature in visions of history that were otherwise entirely anthropogenic in their orientation, it is clear that in the mind of Mike Davis, his contemporaries’ arguments concerning the evolutionary path to proletarian hegemony actually thwarted both the time and the necessity of revolutionary possibility itself.

Davis’s entire oeuvre rehearses a dialectic of catastrophe and revolution—that is, of an apocalyptic Nature that will not be subordinated to normative periodizations that would instrumentalize it as an adjunct to human history, but that, in the course of that refusal, potentiates both the consciousness and possibility of a revolutionary time. This accounts for the contrarieties animating Davis’s early works, in which the problem of collective action—the failures of labor to gain political hegemony in the US—are examined instead as triumphs of collective action, and indeed of class war, waged by postreformist interests against both the racialized and indigenized poor in North America and the targets of American imperialism abroad. In Prisoners of the American Dream (1986) and City of Quartz (1990), the sunbelt Bolshevism of homeowners’ associations in California’s suburbs and neoliberal boosters in LA pointed to the need for insurgent alliances among members of a global precariat. A commodified Nature and naturalized political economy alike are referenced in these volumes, but chiefly in order to focus on their effects on the production of a grotesque urbanism.

This dialectic of catastrophe and revolution approaches self-conscious expression in The Ecology of Fear (1998), where a natural revolution—in the form of capitalism’s encroachments on the Western landscape—meets a revolutionary environment in the form of firestorms that, in turn, reveal Angelinos’ anxieties about an alienated Nature to be synonymous with dread of an imagined incendiary other. (This is how the volume makes a sound case for letting Malibu burn, for example: as the naturalized view corridors of the real estate industry reveal themselves to have always been the fire corridors of an ignored ecology, the return of a repressed Nature is then acknowledged and displaced onto the indigenized poor, who are in turn disproportionately sacrificed to the blaze …) The demographic authors of what Davis termed a magical urbanism to describe the Latinx remaking of the American metropolis in this way become the denizens of his Dead Cities (2002) instead.

In Davis’s so-called disaster narratives, each inversion of received history necessarily points to the next. The tragic fires and bedraggled mountain lions of Ecology of Fear are synecdoches for a history that has denatured ecological processes of the planet as a whole, just as the forms of land speculation outlined in the book stand in for a mode of production to which we have given quasi-ecological status, along with the hierarchies attending its social Darwinist assumptions. In Late Victorian Holocausts (2001) and Planet of Slums, Davis abandons these metonyms so that the level of analysis is finally systemic and planetary in scale. In Late Victorian Holocausts, global climate patterns and the economy of long waves are synchronized with one another via permanent and anticipatory forms of counterrevolution practiced by Great Britain’s viceroys in India, Lord Lytton and Lord Curzon. They have an agentic origin. As Davis puts it, the New Imperialism becomes the third gear of this catastrophic history.⁶ The policies that made, displaced, and then killed the precariat of the Global South are not incidental to the confluence of economies and ecologies or an attendant development gap, but the result of a politics knowingly advanced on utilitarian grounds. The reasons Lord Lytton allowed Indians to starve to death while their grain was exported elsewhere, return or persist in the IMF and the World Bank’s expressions of concern about dependency syndrome a century later, when the structural adjustment policies they implemented were, in part, responsible for generating the largest single migration in human history and the ensuing creation of a Planet of Slums (2006).⁷

To recognize that the majority of the world’s urban population is forced to seek shelter under a brutal regime of privatized squatting—on pavements in Mumbai, rooftops in Cairo, or cliffside shanties in Rio de Janeiro—is to invite speculation about the relation between a surplus humanity warehoused in this manner and the forms of agency or imagination that might alter the ecological fate of the planet as a whole.⁸ (This is because the urbanization of humanity, as Davis reminds us, is the single most important cause of global warming.) In Old Gods, New Enigmas (2018), Davis takes up the same problem of subaltern agency raised by the late capitalist triage of humanity he documented in Planet of Slums and explicitly links it to the climate crisis, asking: Who will build the Ark? Splitting his response into what appear, at first, to be opposed pessimistic and optimistic imaginaries/scenarios, in actuality Davis advances a single dialectic of catastrophism that seems to recuperate the concept of revolutionary time as a logical/historical necessity. This is how: in the universalization of designations like the Anthropocene, contemporary humanity both acknowledges the climate catastrophe it is making and simultaneously domesticates it in the [as the] catastrophism of various ‘post-natural’ ontologies.⁹ In this way, a sober assessment of the possibility of catastrophic time—that is, of sudden intrusions of the future into the present—is abandoned in favor of a species of historical periodization that is indistinct from resignation. When we abandon ourselves in this fashion to a teleology of disaster, ideology mistakes itself for gritty realism. And, in the face of such a turn, the act of summoning what is not becomes simultaneously pragmatic and revolutionary: either we fight for ‘impossible’ solutions to the increasingly entangled crisis of urban poverty and climate change, or become ourselves complicit in … [the ongoing] triage of humanity.¹⁰

The global ecological history that Davis inaugurated in the oeuvre outlined here has always refused dogmatic closure in favor of an urgent program of action and thought premised on the negation of the neoliberal order’s given alternatives. This is why it has enjoyed a viral career across a series of disciplines ranging from urban studies to history, geography, political science, and more. It is also why Davis’s work has become a crucial referent for the production of new knowledges by a generation of scholars, artists, and activists represented in the pages of this volume. Beyond their willingness to delve into the catastrophes of the present that hide by not hiding in plain sight, what binds the studies assembled here to one another and to the work of Mike Davis is an appeal to what is not in the relentless critique of what is.

Endnotes

1David Bowie, Thru These Architect’s Eyes, Outside (Arista/BMG, 1995).

2Jane Holtz Kay, Apocalypse Now?, The Nation , December 17, 2002, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/apocalypse-now/ .

3Kay, "Apocalypse Now?

4Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (London: Verso, 2020), 3.

5Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3; Theodor W. Adorno, Shierry Weber Nicholsen, and Paul A. Kottman, Ernst Bloch’s Spuren: On the Revised Edition of 1959, in Notes to Literature , ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Columbia University Press, 2019), 204–5.

6Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, 2002), 13.

7Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006), 151–73. It bears stating that, although Davis acknowledges that the founders of contemporary political ecology, Nancy Watts and Michael Peluso, were important influences in the writing of Late Victorian Holocausts , a significant part of that work was completed after Davis joined the Faculty of History at SUNY Stony Brook. Encounters with a remarkable cadre of radical historians there—some whom were already developing historiographic arguments for what we now call global history—are also a part of this work’s origin, as were the conversations Davis held with scientists at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, with whom he met to review the complexities of historical weather patterns. The origins of Davis’s global environment history are multiple.

8Davis, Planet of Slums , 176.

9Mike Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (London: Verso Books, 2018), xxi–xxii.

10 Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas , 221.

A SORROWFUL STORM

Between Penitence and Anthropolitics in the Anthropocene

Mauro J. Caraccioli

Of the many lenses critical social theorists have developed to understand the present era, ruination is not usually one that comes to mind. There are several books, studies, and research collectives interested in how the catastrophic can serve as a potential site from where future forms of human life—if not just theories of the future—can emerge.¹ Mass extinctions, collapsed ecosystems, drought, and displacement are all mainstays of contemporary scholarship and media examining the effects of global climate change. Yet as the urbanization, automation, and large-scale dispossession that characterize our era of late capitalism expand, the crosshairs of ruination now seem to point at human activity itself. Indeed, proponents of the emergence of an Anthropocene have increasingly moved away from the mere epistemic dimensions of this concept toward what our present ecological condition means for the future of humanity itself. The human species today possesses a world-historical character that is no longer geared toward its own liberation. Rather, humanity now aims at a form of ecological domination that far surpasses the long-enduring optimism of a technological or providential fix to the problems posed by extraction, waste, and extinction.²

In this chapter, I turn to the distinct existential anxiety surrounding our contemporary ecological crisis. Specifically, I examine the social positioning of critics at the fringes of the so-called climate wars, as they offer contending narratives about humanity’s future (or lack thereof) in the face of a dying planet. I am particularly concerned with articulating the growing sense of human penitence cultivated by voices who believe that we are on the brink of an ecological catastrophe. Though arguably a response to the innovation enthusiasts found in conventional sustainability narratives, ecological penitence has become a pervasive ethos among a growing number of climate change affirmers. It is also indicative of several political challenges. Most salient is the seemingly reactionary threat of wholesale class erasure, where rich and poor alike are allegedly judged equally in front of a grand, cosmic mea culpa. Though this verdict may seem reassuring to some, who think that money and class conflict no longer matter in the grand arc of the planet’s demise, my goal is to show how a smothered class conflict remains latent within the eco-penitential vision.

I begin by examining the rise of what conventional media outlets have described as the conceivable future, a normative shorthand for painful ethical questions that previous generations did not have to confront.³ Among the dilemmas present generations encounter is the legitimacy of having children, which is itself a stand-in for a spectrum of reproductive concerns over a future environmental collapse. I situate this crisis of fecundity within what I call the political economy of climate terror: a distinct form of rhetorical coping deployed by scholars, activists, and media figures alike in their dire assessments of the modern human condition. Juxtaposing evangelical and journalistic depictions of climate change’s wars to come, I focus on what it is about climate catastrophe that downplays the power of mass politics while simultaneously exonerating capitalism as if it were a kind of ghost that cannot be exorcised. I conclude with a call for a kind of reflexivity that mediates the use of climate narratives with a critical analysis of collective reckoning that eschews solitude.

By addressing idealistic expressions of climate penance, my aim is to undo the distinction between two kinds of historical narratives: those that make contrition the centerpiece of their analysis and those that frame global political liberation as the goal of all human action. In this sense, I maintain that ecological penitence is but one side of the same coin of historicist reasoning: whether by death or deliverance, human salvation remains rooted in human agency. Instead of lamenting the challenges of climate change, critics and activists should reframe our collective futures as a reckoning over where our political imaginaries have failed. Doing so allows us to conceive of collective action as a necessary expression of climate change narratives, rather than as a response to them. Such forms of critical social thought may then help us to more confidently and imaginatively take on the multiple ends of the world, particularly as we currently know it.

The Guilt of a Conceivable Future

Environmentalists are no strangers to existential dilemmas. The very notions of conservation, preservation, sustainability, resilience, and a plethora of other watchwords are inherently about the limits of any ecosystem to endure human presence and (more often than not) exploitation. Yet much of the ethos behind green movements and ideologies has also been about human ingenuity in the face of crisis. Though critics may historically regard environmentalists as luddites, a significant strain of environmental activism in the Global North is rampantly optimistic about technology’s capacity to solve specific ecological problems, as long as there are resources and the political will to do so.⁴ Indeed, the dividing line between those who consider themselves environmentalists and those who do not is quite often ideological, rather than technological, based as it is on whether one believes that the so-called free market should drive innovation and change or whether some variant of the state should. Hence, contrary to depictions in popular media, the charge of apocalyptic reasoning only partly applies to environmentalists.

There is, however, a broader ethos that modern environmentalists in the Global North have been guilty of: the need for penance as a result of the human exploitation of nature. The concept of ecological penitence itself has multiple origins. Be it a Socratic veneration of the things under the earth and the heavenly things;⁵ the accounts of early explorers of the New World as they documented the beliefs and practices of indigenous people;⁶ or the Christian modification of naturalism as a form of bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth, Western conceptions of humanity’s place on the planet are rife with overtones of cosmic awe. In his celebrated Traces on the Rhodian Shore, for example, Clarence Glacken documents the longstanding influence of monastic orders on such pious interpretations of nature. The domesticating activities of the heroes of penitence and purity, as one observer described them, combined a zeal for conversion with readiness to make those changes in the natural environment which were required for the performance of heavenly tasks on earth.⁷ That many of these later monastic orders held millenarian conceptions of the coming end of the world only added to the urgency of finding a balance between human activity and natural life.

As industrialization drew greater numbers of people away from the countryside into the cities, the penitential character of ecological advocacy gave way to more familiar vocabularies of economic and social justice.⁸ Campaigns for fair wages and working conditions sought to relieve the plight of individuals and families, even if industry increasingly decimated nature. Some variants of socialist thinking went as far as to espouse fealty to the planet’s inner workings. Peter Kropotkin famously called for the functional integration of town and countryside that would bring about the opportunity of experiencing rural life to skilled industrial laborers as well as put farmlands to work toward what Kropotkin called the unification of farmer and mechanic within one person.⁹ Nearly all early expressions of eco-socialism, however, suffer from a techno-optimistic ethos that made history a more valuable target to win than planetary homeostasis.¹⁰ Nature was, at the end, a subject of and subjected to human progress.

Yet as climate skepticism today has become the weapon of corporate interests, environmentalist groups have begun to question this purported subservience. Recent media coverage has homed in on a growing trend among green-minded activists: the limits of a conceivable future. While population bombs and the limits to growth have been mainstays of environmental thinking for decades, popular debate over these never reached much of a global crescendo. Central to the growing narrative of the conceivable future is the idea that climate change—and more specifically, the scientific consensus around its inevitable and dramatic effects on the earth—warrants a reevaluation of humanity’s basic proclivity for procreation. The movement broadly encompasses so-called breeders and nonbreeders alike, as the negative effects of climate change do not discriminate between those who desire to have children and those who do not. There is more nuance to the conceivable future movement, however, than merely a position in favor of or against having children. Various iterations of the population control mantra have emerged from (and been incorporated by) reproductive justice initiatives aiming to clarify various political and economic dimensions of the climate crisis.

In order to study the debilitating sense of guilt and dispossession that pervades much of the conceivable future platform, I want to first acknowledge the spectrum of positions within these narratives and show how they contribute to a form of so-called ecological penitence. According to Meghan Kallman and Josefine Ferorelli, cofounders of Conceivable Future (the eponymous research and advocacy network founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2015), the greatest challenge that climate change raises for people is not merely the impact generated by having children but rather the psychological effects of the guilt associated with such decisions. These concerns span a gamut of issues emerging from the paradoxes of contemporary capitalism: healthcare, affordable housing, childcare, environmental waste, and education. Added to these are fears of a child facing an ecological disaster on one’s own, leading to families wanting to have more than one child. Naturally, the more idealist aspirations of changing the world’s fate by raising more selfless people also continue to play a motivating role. As Kallman and Ferorelli put it in a 2018 story about their work in the New York Times: These stories tell you that the thing that’s broken is bigger than us…. The fact that people are seriously considering not having children because of climate change is all the reason you need to make the demands.¹¹

Testimonies on the Conceivable Future forum include immediate and long-term concerns. These range from a woman posting about her atmospheric carbon legacy (in the United States) for every child she has (about 9,441 metric tons across a genetic lifetime according to one source, or 58.6 tons a year¹²) to the psychological effects of having to negotiate reproductive aspirations in an age where the costs of having a child are dwarfed by the price of other mainstays in modern society, such as a mortgage or a college degree. That having to choose between housing, education, or procreation has been increasingly normalized is no accident. Having children is only the most recent quandary in a wave of social transformations that have upended what scholars typically assumed about distinct pillars of modern social life in the West. It also coincides with the broad demobilization of trade unions and collective bargaining gains in advanced industrialized economies over the last forty years.¹³

Make no mistake: it is mostly middle-class individuals who are making the cost-benefit analysis of having children. The most affluent in these societies have in fact moved reproductive capacity away from the realm of aspiration toward a realm of more apocalyptic considerations of survivalist or interplanetary colonization.¹⁴ The poor, to their credit and dismay, muddle through the puzzle of procreation as best they can, without access to contraception or adequate childcare. Therefore, buried behind the political advocacy of groups such as Conceivable Future are deep-rooted concerns over a kind of reproductive hierarchy being promoted across industrialized economies, not just the planet’s carrying capacity.

The Political Economy of Climate Terror

The negative connotations of any ideology of population control are inherent to the claims themselves. That is to say, reining in human reproduction is always beholden to a governing ethos that aims to privilege social circumstances over natural proclivities. Only the most radical couch their calls for reproductive restraint around solely aesthetic or nativist claims. In the twentieth century alone, figures such as Rachel Carson, Garret Hardin, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Donella Meadows, and Elinor Ostrom have all been linked in one form or another to extremist visions of antinatality when making their calls to slow down human growth on the planet.¹⁵ Some have been more explicit than others about outright constriction, be it forced sterilization or state-led policing; others have used social and economic priorities to mask a more eugenicist resolve.¹⁶ These polemics continue today, even though the same forces of capital that have historically relied on an expanding population to renew the ranks of workers and dispossessed are now calling for greater reproductive responsibility from the far more dynamic, yet still indentured middle classes. Call it neoliberal or neocapitalist, the outcome remains one of exploiting the material sensibilities of groups with the power to collectively organize against the unraveling of state regulation and widespread social safety nets in order to further the entrenchment of an individualist ethics that benefits the most well-off. And as Marxists have long shown, a division of labor in material production naturalizes the division between the governing values of an era, thus exacerbating class and political conflict.

Today’s version of the baby wars differs from previous iterations in that it assents to the traditional concerns of capital: growth, advancement, innovation, and fiscal responsibility by way of reproductive responsibility. The alleged realism of not wanting more human beings on this planet to consume resources the way some do today completely ignores questions of material conditions and how conspicuous consumption is left unquestioned. The sentiment is not wrong: adding another person (let alone millions of others) to a hyperconsumerist landscape certainly increases the burden on our planet’s ecosystems. But to draw attention to and blame the consequences of population growth on individuals, all while our global economic system incrementally ravages resources and people alike, is downright complacent. Most of the media coverage on changing attitudes toward reproduction resembles the same neoliberal arguments, stating that inequality and poverty are matters of individual responsibility. That the apocalyptic burden of a dying planet has been offset to aspiring professionals and couples is not the most worrisome factor here. Rather, the debilitating consequence of these narratives is the internalization of capitalism as an extension of human nature, which is (as so many critical social theorists have warned) the worst and most pernicious naturalization of an inherently greedy, imperialistic, and self-aggrandizing economic order.

As Kallman has argued elsewhere, scholars and activists should turn to the voices of those affected by climate change to make a case for global transformation. In her view, traction can emerge by directly telling people’s stories, for: The idea of testimony is that your truth and these lived experiences have more ability to move political structures than all the charts and numbers in the world.¹⁷ Yet what Kallman and others downplay, perhaps inadvertently, is that the individuals that their work bears witness to are not born into social vacuums. Indeed, the lived experiences of climate change are only a stepping-stone to institutional transformation; necessary still is the recognition that the world’s seemingly timeless order has never been solid, and is quickly melting into more than just air. More specifically, social circumstances in capitalist societies have a dramatic effect on how human beings conceive of their abilities, potential, rights, aspirations and, ultimately, of the source of their struggles. Climate change shows how these circumstances are unsustainable to an extreme, but also entails the entrenchment of capitalist interests against all facts. You can see some of these paradoxical conditions at work when the same media stories advocating for curtailed reproductive norms also employ penitential discourses as a way of goading other countries or individuals to follow suit.

As one recently published story in the Independent showcased, quoting Florence Blondel, director of a London-based charity organization called Population Matters: You can’t ignore the UK, because you also have migration here; people come here with their children. You need to be successful here in order to take the message to developing countries, otherwise people would just be suspicious. The UK needs to be an example.¹⁸ These and other, similar accounts thus lead to the question: is the guilt over a conceivable future really about population?

In a photo essay published on August 1, 2018, the New York Times ran a story by Nathaniel Rich about the decade in which American scientists allegedly arrived at the realization of climate change’s grave threats and attempted (unsuccessfully) to address these.¹⁹ Titled Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, the intervention is a massive investigative account of the motivations, exchanges, and commitments of a group of US climate scientists between 1979 to 1989, a period the author describes as the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change.²⁰ Specifically designed for viewing on the web, the essay is flanked by aerial photographs of broken-up ice floes, burned-out neighborhoods, and sand-covered streets in a nondescript city. In disaster-movie fashion, each photograph is interspersed with fragments of an ominous warning: Thirty years ago, we had a chance to save the planet. The science of climate change was settled. The world was ready to act. Almost nothing stood in our way—except ourselves.

These warnings are suggestive of both the contents of the piece and their implications, one presumes, for the places depicted in the photographs. Rich’s essay has sparked a flurry of editorials, articles, and online fora in response. Within a few weeks of its publication, there was even a brief bidding war for the television rights to the article, with Apple Inc. successfully outbidding at least six other television producers for the rights to dramatize the story.²¹ The article describes more than just the individual motivations and collective obstacles behind the seeming political impasse of the climate wars. Rich’s narrative in fact spends more time tracing the source of planetary inaction away from the conventional bogeymen of fossil-fuel executives, lobbyists, spin-artists, and corrupt scientists. Rather, as he puts it, the focus should be on how in a certain opportune moment, Almost nothing stood in our way—nothing except ourselves. That Rich actually uses his narrative to delve into musings on human nature and the redemptive value of suffering only confirms what critics have long suspected: it is easier to blame climate change on a cosmic flaw, an enduring original sin, than on calculated gain:

We are capable of good works, altruism and wisdom, and a growing number of people have devoted their lives to helping civilization avoid the worst. We have a solution in hand: carbon taxes, increased investment in renewable and nuclear energy and decarbonization technology.… We can trust the technology and the economics. It’s harder to trust human nature. Keeping the planet to two degrees of warming, let alone 1.5 degrees, would require transformative action. It will take more than good works and voluntary commitments; it will take a revolution. But in order to become a revolutionary, you need first to suffer.²²

While the journalistic value of Rich’s narrative should not be dismissed, his is an account of loss and regret over a collective diffusion of responsibility. It is important to point out here that such narratives, even when they support collective action and change, serve the function of dramatizing humanity’s plight as a cycle of moral judgment. Revolutionary penitence is still a narrative of atonement, a kind of reflexivity that lays the blame for political deadlock, if not collusion, on a bogeyman or invading army that never materializes. More troubling about these kinds of penitential reflexivity, however, is how they